Foreign to Many, the Language of College Basketball Has Its Fluent Speakers

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Virginia Coach Tony Bennett with his team. Coaches and players speak in a lexicon that all instantly recognize.CreditSteve Helber/Associated Press

By Ray Glier

March 19, 2016

RALEIGH, N.C. — The patois of college basketball gives the game some of its unique flavor in the film room or on the court during the tedium of daily practice.

This language of the game among players and coaches can describe offensive and defensive positioning, a cut and pass, or a scheme. Some of these phrases come over the air on television from commentators who played the game. Some are not so well known, but coaches bark them out daily, and players immediately understand.

“Pressure/wall/box” has a place in University of North Carolina lexicon.

“Big men should pressure the man they are guarding, and wall means get hands straight up without fouling, and then box the man out so he doesn’t get the rebound,” said Nate Britt, a junior.

Here is another command heard at Carolina practices: “Shot fake/stay down.” Players hear it all the time when facing a team adept at shooting 3-pointers. The shooter uses a head fake to get the defensive man in the air, then dribbles around him or shoots the ball with the defensive player off balance. Carolina players, Britt said, are constantly reminded not to leave their feet.

Virginia guard Devon Hall said his team’s defense could “ice the screen,” a defensive technique mostly used on one side of the floor or the other. The defensive player guarding the man with the ball does not allow the offense to set a screen. Thus, he ices the screen, forcing the dribbler away from the middle of the floor and toward the baseline, where there is more defensive help.

“Help the helper” refers to a defensive team’s rotation toward the ball. The offensive player with the ball may get around a defensive player, but a teammate comes to the rescue with “help” defense. And behind the helper is another teammate rotating to the aid of the helper, who has left his man.

Virginia is one of the most skilled teams in college basketball at helping the helper, which leads to another piece of jargon: “stay in the gaps.” The rotation of the Virginia defense, Hampton Coach Edward Joyner said, means Cavaliers players are always in the gaps, those open spaces in an offense. Being in the gaps takes away clean passes.

The Cavaliers’ defense is called pack line, which is similar to what Butler calls its 21 defense. The five players in Butler’s defensive scheme stay within 21 feet of the basket. It makes it difficult to get the ball into the foul lane, which is also the objective of the Virginia defense.

There is America’s Cup and America’s Team. Did you know there is America’s Play?

Butler forward Austin Etherington said his version of America’s Play was a post player, or big man, coming across the foul lane on the baseline to set a screen for the shooting guard. The shooting guard then flies into the lane with the help of the screen. Another post man comes down the lane and sets a second screen for the shooting guard to spring him into the open.

“So many teams use something like this that they have called it America’s Play,” Etherington said. Variations of this double screen are also called the Picket Fence.

Speaking of screens, Virginia’s Evan Nolte described the Iverson Cut, named for the former N.B.A. All-Star Allen Iverson. It is two screens set on the top of the key about five feet apart. Iverson would dash from one side to the other, using the two screens to get open and receive a pass.

Ted Jeffries, the former Virginia basketball player and radio analyst for the team, uses the term “screener always open.” This is the forerunner of the N.B.A. phrase for “pick-and-pop.” The man who sets the screen causes a traffic jam among four players. Suddenly, two defensive players are guarding one offensive player. The screener is unguarded and can receive the ball for an open shot.

In this era of ball screens, Virginia is one of the programs that still screens away from the dribbler. Cavaliers players constantly set screens for one another, especially along the baseline, and these are “mover blockers.”

Emerson Kampen, a Butler assistant coach who is called the program’s basketball analyst, said two big men setting a screen was called “a double drag.” Kampen described “whipping the screen,” which is a defensive player coming underneath the screen and avoiding contact that could knock him off the ball.

The “nail” is an actual nail. Every court has one. It is a driven into the wood in the middle of the painted foul line. It is the exact middle point of the line, and it is used by court engineers to fix a straight line to the front of the rim.

One of the ways to defeat a zone defense is for the offense to post one of its players “on the nail,” right in the middle of the zone defense. It keeps the zone from extending out too far on the offense’s guards.

The language of basketball is known from coast to coast, from “jump and swipe” to “blast the screen” to “finish the defense” to “drive the closeout.” Walk into any locker room during the N.C.A.A. tournament and blurt out any of these terms, and heads will nod.

Correction:

An article in some editions last Sunday about the language of college basketball among players and coaches misstated the surname of the radio analyst for Virginia men’s basketball games. He is Ted Jeffries, not Jefferies.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SP5 of the New York edition with the headline: The Game’s Foreign Language Has Its Fluent Speakers . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe